Cain eventually murdered Abel, showing that sibling rivalry is as old as time itself. Maybe he was watching too much Elmo on Sesame Street?

Then Adam and Eve bonked again and made Seth. Seth then went on to take wives...

Um, two things here:

If Eve is a part of Adam and they bonked, and we all essentially came from these two - or, rather, that ONE - does that mean that when we have sex with ANYONE it's incest?

Where did Adam and Eve get the time to create women? Where did these women come from that Seth took?

Did Cain or Abel marry women? Maybe that's why Cain turned to murder?

Did Genesis even mention women?!

Given that humans live 80 years, Eve would have had to have been very busy to make enough women for Seth to get jiggy with.

If some people take the bible literally word for word, how do they write off Genesis as it invites more questions than provides nice brainless stories to blindly believe...

I wish I still had my bible. Nice blue cover, but that made me think of a line from the 60s sitcom "The Beverly Hillbillies" where Ms Hathaway talked of Jethro's "big blue book of fairy tales". Ms Hathaway was so cool. So was Nancy Culp. Jed was cool, but Buddy Ebsen is a real scumsucking bastard, oh he'd just love it today, what being a big repuke and all...

He has some very interesting theories about how the human race came into being, based on study of old manuscripts, many of which became The Bible. We were created by genetic scientists, the 'Elohim' mentioned in the Bible (i.e.; 'gods') to be a slave race. I'm not going to go into it, but if you ever run across a book by Zecheria Sitchin, give it a read just for fun.

but I don't discount myths. They fascinate me. I believe they are created from some remnant of truth left dormant in the human consciousness. In other words, I think they contain clues as to the orgin of our existence.

I don't think so. Medical advances over the past century have actually made the average lifespan drastically SHORTER than it was in biblical times. Methusala lived to be 900 before man start meddling in god's affairs with his 'science'. Eve probably lived to 600 at the very least.

Ok, my question is this: people that take the bible literally think the world started around 6000 years ago with Adam and Eve, right? If so, is it even possible to reach the population we have now starting from 2 ancestors in just 6k years without some drastic change in human reproduction? Seems like 6k would only give about 300-500 distinct generations for all of humanity. Of the myriad inconsistencies and illogic of creationism this seems like it'd be easy to debunk, but I don't have my math hat on now.

And that tradition has continued without a break till this day. Remember that Cain was jealous that Abel's animal sacrifice was preferred by God over Cain's crop sacrifice. So the first murder wasn't over sex or money, but who's form of worship God favored. And Cain was stupid because it wasn't that God didn't like vegetables so much as that He appreciated the fact that Abel gave up the really tasty stuff for his Creator while all Cain gave up was a salad, saving the livestock for his own table.The whole thing is just a metaphor for personal growth through real sacrifice, the kind that hurts. God, Cain and Abel are just the players. Nice job fellas. Take a bow.

WARNING: This site will confuse and disturb many people who have only looked at Christianity from the tradtional way. These people are pretty freaky who do this site, but the info they provide (while masked with blasphemous humor (to some)) is fairly close to at least one Gnostic way of looking at the OT and NT.

12. there are TWO creation stories in Gen---the rib, and the dust/clay

One version is the one you mention, the rib; in the other, god creates 'em both out of clay or mud or dust or whatnot and breathes life into 'em. Boy, you can really rile up some freepers (I've done it!) by suggesting that means that you have to take it metaphorically, not literally. Hooo!

There are two creation stories: the first (a conjoining of the E and P threads) is the one generally invoked by creationists, with God making the universe in six days. The second, from the J thread, is the Garden of Eden story. There are enough dissimilarities between the two to make it clear that they are two pieces of oral tradition, and the compiler(s) of the Torah thought it important to set them each side-by-side. In neither case was it assumed to be literal history.

He was a hard-line Repug. When Nancy Kulp ran for public office as a Democrat some years later (I think it was in Tennessee or Kentucky), Ebsen came down there to campaign for her opponent. Naturally, the Repug won. Kulp died shortly thereafter.

Genesis is a conglomeration of three oral traditions, known as the J, E, and P traditions. The names come from the Hebrew words for "God" used in each strain.

Because the three traditions were transmitted orally for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years before being written down, there are gaps and inconsistencies in the story. Perhaps one of the three traditions actually had a story about where Cain's wife came from, but that is not the only cryptic passage in Genesis. What does "and the sons of God married the daughters of men" mean? It was probably explained in one of the three original traditions, but whoever wrote the final manuscript of Genesis had some continuity programs and should have submitted his manuscript to an editor who could have flagged spots like that.

Mainstream Christians do not believe that Genesis is the literal truth, and they have not since the mid-nineteenth century. However, some have noted that the creation story occurs in roughly the same order as evolutionary theory states. In addition, one of the puzzling passages, "and there were giants in the earth in those days," is possibly a dim ancestral memory of the days when the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons coexisted in the Middle East.

But yes, Genesis is largely mythology. So what? Only the fundies get their panties in a bunch when you mention that. If you'd go up to your average mainstream Christian and say, "Guess what, the world wasn't created in six days," said average mainstream Christian would say, "Tell me something I don't know."

24. A good, if limited, explanation of the "documentary hypothesis"...

Genesis is a conglomeration of three oral traditions, known as the J, E, and P traditions. The names come from the Hebrew words for "God" used in each strain.

Actually, there are four traditions used in the Torah as a whole. The "E" tradition refers to God as "Elohim," while the "J" tradition uses God's alleged name transliterated into English as "YHWH." (Observant Jews are forbidden from pronouncing it, and subsitute "the Lord" or ha'shem, literally "the name." Many Christians, particularly in the Catholic tradition, pronounce it as "Yahweh," although earlier traditions had it as "Jehovah.") the other two traditions are not distinguished by names for God, but rather thematic concerns. The "P" (for Priestly) tradition places great emphasis on the basis for the Temple at Jerusalem and its ceremonies -- such as the notion, in the first creation story, on how God, after creating the world, rested on the Sabbath, and on how the sun and moon were created for determing "the times and the seasons" -- in other words, when annual ceremonies like Passover and Tabernacles were to be held. The final tradition, "D" (for Deuteronomic) was the latest to emerge, possibly after the exile, and emphasized Israel's status as the "chosen people," commanded to keep themselves separate from the polluting gentiles, and subject to God's special care if faithful. The "D" source is, as its name suggests, primarly found in the book of Deuteronomy and isn't, I believe, in Genesis at all.

Mainstream Christians do not believe that Genesis is the literal truth, and they have not since the mid-nineteenth century.

Actually, mainstream Christians haven't believed that all of Genesis was literally true long before that, although most probably accepted some conflation of the two Genesis creation stories, in the absence of evidence to the contrary. In fact, it was only the controversies surrounding Darwin that caused some in the Christian world to "dig in their heels" and reject it all in favor of an insistence on scripture being "inerrant." People often assume that fundamentalism is an ancient approach to Christianity; in fact, it began with the publication of a series of tracts that set out the literalistic approach to the Bible, titled "The Fundamentals," barely a century ago. "That Ol' Time Religion" is actually not that old after all.

the official Bible. I guess she got tired of Adam and took off, so then God provided him with Eve. Lilith is still supposed to be around too, because she left the Garden of Eden before God took away mankind's immortality after the fall. Of course subsequent traditions have turned her into a sort succubus type demon.

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